Dylan Thomas: A Poet's Guide

This is the city where one of the most extraordinary

stories of British poetry unfolded.

It was here in New York that the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas first

burst onto the American scene - reading to thousands,

recording LPs, and touring like an unlikely rock star.

And Thomas might have done a lot more, too, had he not died here -

aged just 39.

But death didn't stop the bandwagon.

By the end of the 1960s,

Dylan Thomas was arguably the most famous poet in the world.

And he's still famous today - although often as much for the tales

of his eventful life, his drinking and womanising, as for his poetry.

I'm Owen Shears, a Welsh poet,

and this year, I'll be the same age that Dylan Thomas was

when he died in this city.

Over the years, like many readers,

I've fallen in and out of love with Thomas's poetry.

But what I've never lost is

an admiration for the unmistakable power of his work.

So just what was it about these poems that shot him to fame

as a teenager?

How did he go about creating them?

And looked at in the cold light of day, just how good are they?

100 years after his birth, and six decades from his death,

now is a fitting time to ask just what was it about Dylan Thomas's

poems that so caught - and continues to catch - the world's imagination?

Dylan Thomas might just be the most famous English language poet

of the 20th century.

Poems like Fern Hill

and Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night regularly top

polls of all-time favourites - and not just in Britain.

And yet for all that his work is loved,

Thomas is certainly not without his detractors.

Some critics have claimed that his poetry is showy and overblown,

a collection of turbo-charged sound effects, high on style

but low on content. I don't really think that's fair,

and in this programme I want to take a clear-eyed look

at Dylan Thomas's poetry, across the full range of his writing life.

Because if you do, I think, what you find is plentiful evidence

of a great craftsman at work, and for Thomas being perhaps

the most original poetic visionary of the last hundred years.

This, then, is a tale, not so much about Thomas's life

as about his words.

It's not always easy to pinpoint the beginning of a literary career.

But in the case of Dylan Thomas, I think we can do just that.

And for one of the most challenging, controversial poets

of the 20th century, it all begins in a pretty unusual place.

And this is it - The Listener magazine, March 14, 1934.

Dylan Thomas was just 19 years old.

The Listener was one of the BBC's two weekly publications -

the smaller, brainier sibling of the Radio Times.

But here, tucked away in a corner, was something completely unexpected.

Light breaks where no sun shines

Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart

Push in their tides

And broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads

The things of light file through the flesh

Where no flesh decks the bone.

Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines

was one of the major poems of the 1930s,

a creative depth charge unlike anything seen before.

The great poet TS Eliot was so taken with Light Breaks

that he wrote to its author.

Eliot was a literary giant,

yet the person he was writing to was a virtual unknown.

Some people might expect at that time

a letter from TS Eliot to a radical young poet

to be making its way to an Oxford college or a Bloomsbury flat.

But instead, that letter came here -

a semidetached suburban house in Swansea,

an industrial town on the Welsh coast.

Certainly well on the outer fringes of the literary establishment.

Number Five, Cwmdonkin Drive was a respectable middle-class household.

Its head, DJ Thomas,

was an intellectual schoolmaster with a book-lined study.

His wife, Florence, had a maid to help her run the house.

But TS Eliot's letter was addressed to their son -

19 years old, still living at home

and with barely a qualification to his name.

Upstairs, behind his closed bedroom door,

something extraordinary was happening.

So this is it.

The bedroom where the young Dylan Thomas would have worked.

And it's amazing to think that in this very small room,

so small that Dylan said you had to walk out to turn around,

this is where some of the most exciting

and original poems of the 20th century were written.

Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines, And Death Shall Have No Dominion,

The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower -

they all started here in this room

with, it has to be said, not the most inspiring of views, just a view

of a blank wall, but it obviously worked for the young Thomas.

A candle in the thighs

Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age

Where no seed stirs

The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars

Bright as a fig

Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

He's got this intensity, this full-on-ness,

he's so unembarrassed

and so full of...

There's a boldness to his poetry, to the...kind of the sexual fluids

and the massive universal life and death imagery,

It's incredibly ambitious and bold and lusty and rich

and he's obviously just intoxicated by language - he loves words,

and if there's a kind of gateway drug to poetry, if there's a poet

who's going to get you addicted to words, perhaps it's Thomas.

The extraordinary poems that the teenage Dylan Thomas created

in his bedroom were all set down in very ordinary school exercise books.

Amazingly, we still have those books, now 80 years old.

They're owned by the university at Buffalo in New York State,

and are back in Wales this year for the first time since they left.

It's extraordinary to think that these are those very same notebooks

that Thomas worked on in that tiny bedroom in Swansea.

It's a very intimate

and a very moving experience to be here with them.

I'm not only able to see his drafting and the elements

of his writing, but there are even his fingerprints in the ink.

It's because Thomas was so young

when he was writing in these notebooks that we can trace through

them, poem by poem, his youthful search for an original poetic voice.

And what's very clear is that Thomas had no interest, obviously

from very early on, in merely following the style of the day.

We can watch him in these poems as step by step

he increasingly moves further away from the everyday world around him

of trams and cars and away from the standard

modes of poetry being written at the time, until he arrives at poems

such as Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines, which although we can

see where they've come from, at the same time,

they're also like nothing that's ever been seen before,

incantatory, hypnotic and visceral.

And yet for all this impact,

what bothered some readers was quite simply - what does it mean?

In the case of Dylan Thomas, to ask what the poem means,

what is its story,

is sometimes to ask the wrong question of his work.

The poem itself is actually inviting us

to ask a much more interesting question.

Not so much WHAT does a poem mean, as HOW can a poem mean?

Because that's what's going on here.

Thomas wants to create new forms of poetic experience,

to open language to new ways of meaning, on an instinctive,

aural, maybe even animalistic level.

He wants Light Breaks to be a communication more than

a description, a sensory event.

Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines is unusual

because it's intensely inward, and it fuses the cosmos with

the body, there's no social level or layer at all.

At a time when young poets were all moving towards making

political statements, talking about modern machinery, modernity,

the surfaces of the new Britain, trains, pylons,

at that time, Thomas was the one poet who seems to be turning back

to more archaic things. Blood, bone, the heart,

the inwards of the body, as it were,

and connecting those to the stars, the galaxies, the cosmic cycles.

So, what exactly is the experience Thomas wants us

to have in Light Breaks?

Well, looking at these images in the first verse,

where are they leading us, what are their associations?

"Light breaks where no sun shines

"The things of light

"File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones."

To me, this seems to be a poem about the conception of a child.

"Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart push in their tides."

Is this not the very first circulation of the blood?

And these "broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,"

could these not be the sperm, travelling towards the ovum?

Am I right? Who knows?

However we try to interpret the poem, though,

what's always true is that having passed through it,

we've been altered by its images and music.

We've been moved by it as a song might move us,

on an emotional level of sound and association.

And that's what's really important here -

that we've sensed a creation rather than known one.

Light breaks on secret lots

On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain

When logics dies

The secret of the soil grows through the eye

And blood jumps in the sun

Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines appeared in Dylan Thomas'

first collection, 18 Poems, published in 1934.

The book's dense, visionary poetry wasn't to everyone's taste.

One critic said it was "just poetical stuff without

"shape or form, rather like a tap being turned on."

The unlikely lad from Swansea had made a huge breakthrough.

But the charge of being out of control of his art

would haunt him for the rest of his career.

MUSIC: "Love Is The Sweetest Thing" by Ray Noble

# Love is the sweetest thing

# What else on earth could ever bring

# Such happiness to everything

# As love's old story... #

As the 1930s unfolded, Dylan Thomas led a nomadic life,

centring on London.

He married Caitlin Macnamara, a former dancer,

and they had a son, Llewelyn.

Two further collections cemented his reputation, but didn't advance it.

Some critics detected a repetitiveness,

a failure to move on.

And it was hardly surprising - Thomas was still drawing

most of his poems from his early teenage notebooks.

But then the outside world intervened in Thomas's life

in the most direct way imaginable

and propelled his poetry to a new level.

EXPLOSIONS AND GUNSHOTS

So, what did Dylan Thomas do during the war?

Well, it was a highly unlikely job for a radical modernist poet

and a political refusenik.

But it was one which would contribute to a crucial

change in Thomas's poetry,

when Dylan Thomas the poet became Dylan Thomas the propaganda writer.

MARCHING MUSIC

'We are the makers, the workers

'the wounded, the dying, the dead,

'the blind, the frostbitten, the burnt, the legless

'the mad...'

Working for the Ministry of Information, Thomas scripted

14 wartime documentaries.

Some of these films are now regarded as classics,

the qualities of Thomas's storytelling and language

lifting the images beyond their immediate purpose.

'..the slaves, in Greece and China,

'and Poland,

'digging our own graves.'

Writing poems, though, was proving more difficult.

"War can't produce poetry," Thomas wrote to a friend,

and for much of the conflict, it was true where he was concerned.

Between 1941 and 1944, he wrote little poetry that we know of.

But then the words began to flow again.

Over the course of the war, Thomas would write three poems

in response to the bombing of British cities.

The best of these, and I think the poem in which he glimpses

his way forward, is the audaciously-titled

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.

Never until the mankind making

Bird beast and flower

Fathering and all humbling darkness

Tells with silence the last light breaking

And the still hour

Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round

Zion of the water bead

And the synagogue of the ear of corn

Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound

Or sow my salt seed

In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.

It offers itself no hiding place.

It imagines an afterlife in which suffering won't occur again,

in which death cannot happen again because it's happened

in the here and now,

and I find that very moving.

The poem opens with an incredibly long opening sentence.

If you look at it, it doesn't land with the poem's first full-stop

until halfway through the poem.

It's a really brave piece of suspended sense by Thomas

in which he holds us off and then holds us off again.

What the sentence is saying, essentially,

is that Thomas is refusing to participate in the public

mourning of the child's death

until a list of impossible conditions have been met,

until both he and the world have come to an end.

He will not mourn her, he says, until the last light has broken

or the sea tumbling in its harness has been stilled.

Now, perhaps this is a response by Thomas to his working in those

propaganda films in which the horrors of war are exploited

for other purposes.

But I think there's something else feeding into this line as well.

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London, yes,

it's about the archaic continuum that the dead girl

will enter into, and you think, well, no, it's not specific,

maybe it is just Thomas talking about the cosmos

and the body again, and then you start to notice details.

For example, there's a reference to "the round Zion of the water bead"

and "the synagogue of the ear of corn".

If you look at the draft for this poem, November 1944,

those two properties aren't in it,

but between that time and March of 1945,

the revelations about the concentration camps have emerged.

And he's writing a poem about a dead child,

I don't think, once you've detected that, there can be any doubt that

this is what he's hinting at, the atrocities of Nazi-occupied Europe.

I shall not murder

The mankind of her going with a grave truth

Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath

With any further

Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter.

Robed in the long friends

The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother.

Secret by the unmourning water

Of the riding Thames.

After the first death, there is no other.

Having refused to elegise the child, Thomas then does exactly that,

and all the more effectively for having repudiated a public mourning.

And then there's that great final line,

simple but pregnant with ambiguity,

"After the first death, there is no other."

It's a line that's been interpreted at either end of the scale,

both as an affirmation of life everlasting after death,

and also not.

But what's really interesting for me is that regardless of how

you interpret the line, because of its pacing and its lilt,

it's been lent a very strong sense of finality and consolation.

And what's especially effective here is that break,

that pause halfway through that you can't help but read.

"After the first death, there is no other."

And through that breaking of his rhythm, somehow Thomas has

managed to pull it off, and has moved from the apparently impossible

challenge of the poem's title

to a very real note of resting and peace.

I...always want...poems,

and I think the best poems do get away from you all the time.

If you're being entranced enough by the thing

and it's still like smoke in your clutch,

then that'll do for me, I mean, that is a kind of

hallmark of a good poem for me and I imagine for most people as well.

And that's absolutely what I get at the end of this.

Where that ambiguity works, as in this particular poem,

we're talking about a very significant poet indeed.

A Refusal to Mourn appeared in Dylan Thomas's fourth collection

of poetry, Deaths and Entrances, published in 1946.

The volume was hailed as a triumph,

and established Thomas as the major British poet of the decade.

His first three volumes

had sold just a few hundred copies between them,

but Deaths and Entrances shifted over 10,000 copies

in its first year alone.

And Thomas was still young, just 31.

So where would he take his art next?

The answer lay in part in the last poem in Deaths and Entrances.

Thomas rushed it to the publishers at the last minute.

"I very much want it included," he wrote,

"as it is an essential part of the feeling

"and meaning of the book as a whole."

It's a poem that he later described as being one

"for evenings and tears."

And yet he also said of it that it was a joyful poem,

"the joy as real as that which made the words come at last

"out of a never-to-be buried childhood in heaven, or Wales."

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green

The night above the dingle starry

Time let me hail and climb

Golden in the heydays of his eyes

And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns

And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

Trail with daisies and barley

Down the rivers of the windfall light.

Fern Hill was a real place - the Carmarthenshire farm

where Dylan the child had spent summer holidays.

The poem was written in 1945 shortly after V-J Day in a cottage

a stone's throw from Fern Hill itself.

Thomas had always been a poet of early life.

But here foetuses and burning children give way to real,

ordinary childhood - Thomas's own.

It's been called the poem he was born to write.

My favourite Thomas poem is probably Fern Hill.

It seems to me somehow a cornerstone,

it seems to lie at the heart of it all,

that this was him definitively saying, "I am like this

"because this was my childhood, this is me, this is what I am,"

and I think just the best things about Thomas are all working there.

It's a song of praise. Whatever you believe, it's a song of praise.

So, just what did Dylan Thomas manage to do in this poem to give it

such a place in the hearts of generations of readers?

As usual, Thomas begins as he means to proceed.

"Now as I was" is a paradox in terms of time. It's both past

and present, and it wonderfully prepares us

for Fern Hill's winning mix of immediacy and nostalgia.

But that "now" also does something else for Thomas,

in that it introduces a more conversational tone,

a more storytelling voice.

From that first line,

the poem really rolls along as if in the voice of a remembering,

excited child, all of these "ands" and "its" and "lovelies" layering

upon each other like the brimming delights of a summer holiday.

Fern Hill is like a lot of Thomas's poems,

it works on at least two levels.

So there's a popular level.

It's everybody's granny's favourite poem.

It was voted fourth in a recent poll of favourite poems.

It's a feel-good poem.

But it has other levels, you know, it has depths.

Fern Hill is a poem of peace.

It comes in September of 1945,

after the war, and I think Thomas does want to lead the reader out

from these meditations on war, these hauntings by dead children,

as it were, by presenting something which is fresher.

But it's not a total escape.

"Time held me green and dying

"Though I sang in my chains like the sea."

It's hardly a ringing endorsement of a utopian childhood.

So what of the underlying meaning of Fern Hill?

Well, right from the first stanza, there are hints.

"Once below a time" sounds rather whimsical at first.

But it's a line that carries the great theme of the poem.

Even a child is "below," subject to the inescapable process of time.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand

In the moon that is always rising

Nor that riding to sleep

I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land

Oh, as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

As the poem draws to an end, the skies darken.

The swallow-thronged loft is a symbol of evening,

but also of departure and migration.

And the child is led there by the shadow of his hand

"in the moon that is always rising."

The moon, that colder, nocturnal celestial body.

Fern Hill, I've always found a difficult poem,

because it's always made me feel melancholy.

I think there's a tremendous...

..awareness of the world slipping away...

..that is quite breathtaking,

and I feel emotional about it now, and I'm quite surprised at myself

because I thought I was past feeling emotional about Dylan Thomas.

But that poem...

..is so knowing about what it's losing,

that it's no wonder that it's stood the test of time.

Fern Hill closes with one of poetry's great endings,

and this from the master of endings.

"Oh, as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means

"Time held me green and dying

"Though I sang in my chains like the sea."

There's a wonderful balance of opposites here. The speaker

in the poem is both young and free,

and, yet, also dying and constrained.

And with that very last line,

"Though I sang in my chains like the sea,"

you can't help but think that this is Thomas also writing about

himself as a poet, his verbal energy that is given liberty

through the chains of the patterns and forms in which he works.

Fern Hill confirmed Dylan Thomas

as the most popular British poet of his day.

But some early critics were far from kind to it,

seeing it as a pastoral sell-out by a previously tough-minded poet.

Yet, to me, Fern Hill,

with its tender and vulnerable exploration of innocence and loss,

reads like Thomas's moving search for healing after the trauma of war.

In 1949, Dylan Thomas - husband, father of three, famous poet -

moved to the place now most associated with him,

the Boat House in Laugharne.

Thomas was 34 years old and now had, at long last,

what all writers yearn for - a place of his own in which to write.

Wow. And this is it.

The near-mythical Writing Shed,

where most of his late poetry was written.

It's in this extraordinary position, perched on a cliff,

with this amazing view of sea and fields and sky.

I must say it's very moving to be in here.

So close to Thomas's desk where he wrote those poems.

Thomas may have found the perfect place for writing

but the poetry was not coming easily.

For all that the Writing Shed has become a symbol of his craft,

he only ever managed to write six poems here.

But those late poems saw him once again moving in a new direction,

drawing inspiration not from his teenage febrile imagination,

or from events of war or memory,

but from the natural landscape outside these windows.

This was the view he looked out on every day,

and it soon began to flood into his poems.

One of the best of these late poems is Poem On His Birthday.

In the mustardseed sun

By full tilt river and switchback sea

Where the cormorants scud

In his house on stilts high among beaks

And palavers of birds

This sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave

He celebrates and spurns

His driftwood 35th wind turned age

Herons spire and spear.

The poem is packed full

of the natural world outside these windows -

palavers of birds, herons spire and spear,

the switchback sea with its congered waves,

full of eels, pastures of otters, hawks and gulls.

It's a great example of Thomas the nature poet, capturing

in single images the essence of the animal world around him.

But unlike in Fern Hill,

the natural world here isn't being used to celebrate.

Rather the actions of the birds and the fishes are harnessed

by Thomas to illustrate the argument of his poem.

That man in his living, like all of nature,

is progressing headlong in the direction of his own death.

Under and round him go

Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails

Doing what they are told

Curlews aloud in the congered waves

Work at their ways to death

And the rhymer in the long tongued room

Who tolls his birthday bell

Toils towards the ambush of his wounds

Herons, stepple stemmed, bless.

They're poems of observation but there's also that strong sense

of the outsider in the natural world, someone who hasn't got

access to the continuity of nature, someone who will die.

It's as if the sense of mortality means

he can't or can't any longer engage in nature as part of it.

He's a watcher, almost a desirer, who can't ever reach it.

Ideas of death, entwined with nature and religion, haunt the poem.

Yet Thomas was writing about his 35th birthday -

only halfway to the Biblical quota of three score years and ten.

What could account, then,

for this growing obsession with mortality?

What's of no doubt is that there is a great power

at the heart of this poem.

Not a celestial one, but a terrible man-made power.

One which, at the time Thomas was writing, threatened everyone,

wherever they lived.

He talks about the bones of the hills being blasted out,

he talks of rocketing winds, and he speaks of a serpent cloud.

So again in Thomas's slightly disguised and mythical register,

he's talking about the threat of another world war,

and he's talking about the threat of atomic destruction.

So that hangs over this poem.

And he's very aware of the fact that

that might be the end of the world, there might be no more birthdays.

And this last blessing most

That the closer I move

To death, one man through his sundered hulks

The louder the sun blooms

And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults

And every wave of the way

And gale I tackle, the whole world then

With more triumphant faith

That ever was since the world was said

Spins its morning of praise.

I think of Thomas working in that boat house

and his poems have at once

that sense of timelessness that

all great poems have, that they've existed forever.

And that they have made themselves, in some sense.

And set against that, of course, the very strong sense that

a lot of banging and sawing have gone into

the making of the poems.

And I think of his poems in a strange way as being clinker-built.

As being actually marvels of engineering.

These here are some copies of just some of the worksheets for

Poem On His Birthday. In total, there were over 200 of them.

What these lists brilliantly illustrate is the nature

of Thomas's tireless search for what he considered to be the right word.

Not just in terms of its sense, but in terms of its music.

In these worksheets we can follow him on his trails and watch

the lines of the poem strengthen as he changes his choices.

So "the shriller the sun blooms" becomes "the louder the sun blooms."

"Sings its morning of praise"

becomes "spins its morning of praise."

What's quite surprising is just how ordinary

and expected some of Thomas's first word choices are.

But he then uses that first choice as a launch pad,

a starting point from which to go off and search for

the unexpected word that will bring the line springing off the page.

In a short career, Dylan Thomas had already travelled a great way.

He had been a radical young modernist, a public elegist,

a poet of place, and now a nature poet.

But his next step would see him move into a whole new world -

and take modern poetry with him.

For quite a while, there'd been growing interest

in Thomas's work across the Atlantic.

In turn, Thomas had his eye on America -

a place blissfully free of establishment critics and

whatever it was that was stemming the flow of his poetry.

So when John Malcolm Brinnin -

an American poet and literary wheeler-dealer -

invited Thomas to cross the Atlantic to tour, read and lecture,

he didn't hesitate to sign up.

In February 1950, Dylan Thomas stepped onto a plane

bound for America, and poetry stepped into the mass media age.

There's something of a Dylan Thomas heritage trail in New York City,

just as there is in back in Wales.

There's the Chelsea Hotel where he stayed,

the White Horse Tavern where he drank,

and St Vincent's Hospital where he eventually died.

These are the places, more than anywhere else,

that have fuelled the Thomas myth

and, I think, helped to obscure the poems themselves in the process.

But while these places might be the Stations of the Cross for

Thomas tourists, none of them really tells us anything about the poetry.

The Poetry Centre at the 92nd Street Y in New York was

the site of Dylan Thomas's first public poetry reading in the US.

Its thousand-seater Kaufmann Auditorium was sold out,

and many more people were left standing.

Yet hardly anyone present had ever heard this poet speak.

So what happened that night?

Well, John Malcolm Brinnin - Thomas's promoter -

introduced the poet with showbiz flair,

and perhaps more than a little sense of what the audience wanted.

'Not very long ago, readers of poetry in the English-speaking world

'found their senses quickening at the sound of a new voice.

'A man still in his 20s had quite casually walked in and sat down

'among the geniuses of English poetry.

'This young man's name was Dylan Thomas.

'And he came, said fact and fancy,

'out of the druidical mists of Wales.'

"The druidical mists of Wales."

The exact positioning of Brinnin's tongue and his cheek

are a little difficult to gauge here.

But then Thomas himself stepped up.

He had with him his books and lists, a selection of his own poems,

and favourites culled from the work of others.

Hesitant in his introduction, maybe even a little unsure,

everything changed when he began to read.

APPLAUSE

'And death shall have no dominion

'Dead men, naked they shall be one

'With the man in the wind and the west moon

'When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone

'They shall have stars at elbow and foot

'Though they go mad they shall be sane

'Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again

'Though lovers be lost, love shall not

'And death shall have no dominion.'

What you notice about Thomas' voice here is how

different it is from the voice he used in Britain.

It's more dramatic, more performed,

edging the poems even closer towards song.

He himself described it as hammy,

his second-rate Charles Laughton voice, a badly-played trombone.

But whatever his own opinion, the American audiences loved it.

I think he did inherit that sense of the oral tradition

from his Welsh background.

A lot of the preachers were also poets, and

when they were in the pulpit,

they very often almost sang their homily.

They were able to make the congregation hold their breath.

And I think he must have tried to emulate some of those.

'Though they be mad and dead as nails

'Heads of the characters hammer through daisies

'Break in the sun till the sun breaks down

'And death shall have no dominion.'

APPLAUSE

They're poems that come from the pulpit. They are shanties,

they are nursery rhymes, they've got all these spoken

and sung qualities about them.

Get recordings of him reading the poems, listen to them.

I think that's the best way to experience the poems,

mainline, straight into the ear.

There were several reasons for Dylan Thomas's extraordinary

success in America.

Perhaps most significant, though, was his timing, which was perfect.

His leaping rhythms spoke to the Beat writers

and to great jazz musicians like Charlie Parker.

Alan Ginsburg - who became one of the gurus of this new age -

was enchanted.

As was Bob Dylan, who borrowed the poet's name, and never gave it back.

Middle-aged and portly, with bad breath and bad teeth,

in America, Thomas became the first major British cultural export of

the post-war era, an unlikely rock star before rock stars even existed.

Over the next three years,

Dylan Thomas would give over 150 poetry readings in America,

crisscrossing the country on trains, boats and planes.

It was exhausting.

He may have been a literary rock star,

but he had to carry his own suitcases.

America wasn't all about giving readings of past glories, though.

Something new finally emerged here, and it provoked a response

very different from that directed towards the poetry.

In a programme about Thomas's poetry,

I don't want to dwell too long on Under Milk Wood.

For a start, it isn't a poem -

"a play for voices" is how Thomas himself described it,

written in a "prose with blood pressure."

But at the same time, you can't deny the poetic charge of the piece.

There are, I think, between the lewd jokes

and the montages of dialogue, so many moments of, for Thomas,

surprisingly understated pathos and lyrical beauty.

Under Milk Wood premiered in New York in May, 1953.

That opening night saw Thomas himself take the role of narrator.

'To begin at the beginning.

'It is spring, moonless night in the small town,

'starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the

'hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood

'limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack,

'fishing boat bobbing sea.'

It's just shot through with poetic technique,

and when I listen to it I get hung up on the word order.

I'm fascinated by the character description,

the choice of words, the diction.

Not so much the story, not really interested.

I just love the roll and pitch of the language all the way through.

Even the prose is always veering towards poetry, I think.

Poetry was his first language.

On the whole, I've never thought of Thomas as a poet you'd go to

for intimate truths of human nature.

But in Under Milk Wood, that all changes.

Here in the dark, sexualised, funny and flawed hopes

and dreams of the people of Llareggub, Thomas reveals

himself to be a passionate observer of human frailties.

And this, I think, is where the real strengths of the play lie.

Not so much in its poetry as in its being infused,

for all its satire and mocking, with a sincere warmth

and love for the characters at the mercy of Thomas's pen.

Under Milk Wood was the last major piece of writing

that Dylan Thomas completed.

But there's one final poem I want to have a look at.

It's perhaps Thomas's most famous poem, many would say his best.

And it brings our story full circle.

Do not go gentle into that good night

Old age should burn and rave at close of day

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

If Thomas's poems got more personal as he got older,

his craft ever more wedded to the suffered life,

then Do Not Go Gentle is surely one of the most personal of all.

We're left in no doubt as to its subject.

"And you, my father, there on the sad height..."

This is no longer the cosmos going about its cyclical business,

observed from a writerly distance.

This is death crossing the threshold into the house,

and coming for the man who helped shape the young poet.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Dylan Thomas's father, DJ,

had been his son's poetical starter motor, reading him poems,

providing him with books, correcting his early work.

But DJ himself was a man of frustrated talents.

Despite his first-class degree in English, he never attained

the university post some say he always longed for.

And his own poetry passed unnoticed.

How exactly this affected DJ's son is difficult to say.

But some have interpreted Dylan Thomas's very particular career

in the light of his father's life.

Literary aspiration and achievement, yes,

but also a certain disdain for the establishment worlds of academia

and literature that had left his father out in the cold.

What's remarkable about Thomas's great lament for his father, though,

is its extraordinary restraint.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

This is one of the very earliest manuscripts

of Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.

It's such a famous poem, and such a complete poem,

that to hold it here now, it feels almost timeless,

or centuries old,

rather than something that was written in the 1950s.

It's become, in the scale of its popular reception,

almost a secular psalm.

It's impossible to go to a funeral these days

without hearing a Dylan Thomas poem.

I mean, those poems - And Death Shall Have No Dominion and

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night touch people.

Um...

And people feel that poetry has some kind of use in the world

at that moment when they feel that they need to reach for something.

The first thing that's really noticeable about this poem

is its form, which I think is vital to understanding its power.

To write about his dying father,

Thomas has chosen one of the most difficult poetic forms imaginable.

This is a villanelle - originally a French form that was used

for lighter subjects such as dancing songs or stories of rural delight.

So to write a villanelle about death was highly unconventional.

The villanelle is a tight, limiting form.

There are just two repeating rhymes across the whole poem.

And it's not enough to get a line to work once.

Two lines are repeated, their meanings subtly changing.

It's an argument that advances while using exactly the same words.

The thing about a villanelle is that although it's limiting,

if you get it right, it has an almost undeniable power.

Look at those repeating lines for example.

"Do not go gentle into that good night

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

As the poem advances, these lines pull against each other to

create a really interesting tension.

On the one hand, they repeatedly reinforce the idea that

Thomas wants his father to resist death, to struggle and to fight.

But on the other, the sheer number of repetitions makes us

begin to wonder if Thomas is protesting too much.

And whether even he is really convinced by what he's saying.

CLOCK TICKS

I lost my own father recently and was rereading Do Not Go Gentle.

And I cannot believe any child would wish a parent or a father,

a loved father, to go raging into the dark.

That doesn't convince me.

My view...I've changed my mind about this poem.

My view is that it's Dylan Thomas's elegy for himself.

He was already drying up,

facing a period where he couldn't write as fluently as he could.

This is a terrible thing for a poet, because if you don't write,

you believe that you're never going to write again.

I think he was talking to himself and saying,

"Come on, don't go gently, don't accept this, do something,"

so I find it quite a desperate poem and a very painful one to read now.

One of the great strengths of Dylan Thomas's poetry is that it's

loaded with meaning, often multiple meanings, both contradictory

and yet complementary.

In Do Not Go Gentle he takes this quality to a new level.

In the poem, there's one sense that belongs to its words on the page,

and then another quite different sense that belongs to its sound.

And it's there, I think, in that contradiction,

that the key to this poem's emotional potency lies.

The poem is actually saying...

don't die. It's saying, kick against the pricks.

And it's addressed to his father.

That's what the poem says on the surface,

that's the content, if you like.

But if you read the poem to yourself or aloud, it has a lulling,

almost a lullaby sort of effect, and it seems to me that

that's the counter-narrative.

On the surface the poem is saying, "put up a struggle, don't go gently"

But the rhythm of the poem is saying, you know,

"Please, just go peacefully, good night, make it a good death,

"lapse into it, let there be no pain for you."

And you, my father, there on the sad height

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray

Do not go gentle into that good night

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The end of the story for Dylan Thomas the man is well-known.

Dead in New York at 39,

with all the usual suspects in the vicinity.

To long-standing illness,

there'd been added the familiar excesses of a celebrity lifestyle.

And a posthumous celebrity was what Dylan Thomas became -

the poet of choice for film stars, pop stars, presidents,

and countless teenage poetry fans all over the world.

60 years on, the stations of Dylan Thomas's life have

become something of a tourist trail.

But is this the best way to get closer to him and his work?

I'd argue that if you really want to make a pilgrimage to Dylan Thomas,

then you're better off opening a book of his poems

than jumping on a bus.

Because it's in his poems that you'll meet the truest

essence of him, and with all the immediate energy of his living self.

His ideas and concerns, his joys and despairs, and of course

his extraordinary gift for making language dance to his tune.

When we enter his poetry, we see through his eyes,

and speak with his voice.

We inhabit him and he inhabits us, and in so doing

a part of him, I'd say the most vital part of him, lives on.